Trying to find meaning in catastrophe, pain and suffering is hardly a new concept; just look to Friedrich Nietzsche and his famous aphorism-turned-cubicle-wall-affirmation-turned-Kanye-West lyric “That which doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.” Nor is self-inflicted disaster an entirely unfamiliar method of coming to terms with the existentialist inevitabilities of life and death and meaninglessness and all that — we can thank the Hollywoodization of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club for our collective understanding of a “near-life experience.”

So when embarking on the culture-jamming, anarchistic romp of former-Torontonian, Vancouver-based author Peter Darbyshire’s second novel, The Warhol Gang, most readers are likely to recognize more than a few familiar signposts almost immediately. Appropriating pop-culture icons: check; a Big Brother approach to advertising: check; rampant retail therapy: check; shadowy resistance fighters operating outside society: check.

What makes The Warhol Gang a welcome addition to this outsider literary tradition is Darbyshire’s ability to create a strange and original world in which these conflicting concepts play out in strange and original ways. Trotsky, the novel’s code-named, not-quite-reliable narrator, has just taken a job at a market research company that locks its employees in pods and projects holograms of potential products at them to study the neurological effect on the subjects. In his off-hours, Trotsky roams the vast underground mall that seems to span his entire city, shopping incessantly to alleviate the traumatic experiences of his job and occasionally trying to find a new identity by shop-stalking other people. This behaviour escalates radically when Trotsky starts visiting accident sites and literally embracing victims as they die. Upon discovering that many of the accidents are staged, he is unwittingly inducted into a subculture of nihilism involving a sadistic cop, a fame-hungry femme fatale named Holiday and a group called “The Resistance.”

From here, Darbyshire delivers an intricate tale of an anarchist movement gaining so much popularity as to overwhelm its motives and its founding members — where reality television strips away any authenticity from horrific events and where advertising is so deeply and permanently embedded in the cultural DNA that even the most depraved acts of violence and vandalism seem entirely contrived. It’s a wild ride for sure, and Trotsky’s first-person retelling keeps the novel moving along. Darbyshire’s tone, however, is consistent to the point of being exhausting, with little room for reflection or any significant understanding of Trotsky’s motives. Consequently, there’s a sort of videogame trajectory to the narrative and little reason to care about what happens to any of the characters. Still, this surface-level study works within the context of the novel, seeing how the story is also an exaggerated representation of the herd mentality and the quest for relevance through trendiness.

Needless to say, Darbyshire is juggling a great many conceptual balls here and, for the most part, he does an excellent job of keeping them all aloft. It’s difficult to say whether this is a novel that would benefit more from repeated readings or a film adaptation.